In preparation for some Teacher Only Days I am running next week I have made some new literacy resources for teachers to use. The aim of these resources is to enable students to develop their visual literacy skills through examining images that are authentic, engaging and hopefully provocative at the same time. The resources are aimed at students in years 7-9 but can be adapted to any age by simple changing the types of questions or the subject matter. I have already created a range of similar resources for younger students.

The students are left to make their own decisions about how they want to present the final output, in the resource I have suggested that they use a combination of the following tools:

The long awaited and slightly delayed Scratch 3.0 is here. This is good news for iPad users, as now Scratch will work on iPads and with out an app. Scratch 3.0 is HTML5 compliant and will therefore play on anything. This is good news, it now removes the requirement that some schools had for using Tynker on iPads and Scratch on other devices, or making the leap to Tynker completely. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Tynker is excellent, I code my drones with it, but Scratch has a longer history in schools and the advent of CT and the new Digital Technologies curriculum means that teachers need to have Scratch, or Tynker just work on whatever devices they put in front of their kids. Scratch 3.0 lets that happen.

dSo what is the downside? None really, the interface looks slightly different, the blocks look slightly different, but the good news is that tools like edscratch have been using Scratch type blocks for a while now. Also the integration with other third party hardware like Makey Makey, BBC Microbit and even LEGO Mindstorms has just moved Scratch 3.0 into another realm, a good one too.

The new Scratch 3.0 interface, slightly different layout, with the stage and the sprites moved to the right, just like Tynker. The blocks have had a face lift…These are the additional services and blocks that currently ship with Scratch 3.0. Expect to see more third party interface blocks to appear, exciting times for coding and project based learning in education ahead!

The only downside I can see of the new look, greater functioned Scratch 3.0 for me is the necessity perhaps of having to update all of my Scratch 2.0 based resources for teachers and students…

Resources with blocks like these will now have to be updated…

Perhaps, for the sake of teacher sanity, the sound blocks have been removed from the default block list on the standard Scratch 3.0 interface. I think it will take the students about 30 seconds to find the cat meow again however, so sanity is perhaps not saved… I am looking forward to rolling this out into my client schools in 2019.

This is the third iteration of the dakinane.com website. We have started the new year with a new site and we are very excited to see how the new look and the amalgamation of the content we have created and shared on other sites and domains over the years, gives our clients a better and faster way to access our content and resources.

You can see from the logos below that we have been busy with other projects, but now you can access some or all of these resources from one central location. As ever, we are keen to hear from you. What are your thoughts about our new layout? We wanted to make sure that there was less us in terms of text and more us in terms of the content we have been creating the learning experiences we have designed and implemented in schools.

To access the sites implied by these logos, you will have to scroll through the site to find them, so that you can have a chance to browse our content. Let us know what you think of the new look in the comments. Have a great 2019, we have lots of ideas to implement and innovations to deliver to schools up and down the country. We hope to see you in your classroom soon.